Two known devices are commonly used for supporting large bottles, such as a five gallon water bottle, a three gallon square water bottle, or a three gallon round water bottle, typically used in the drinking water industry. These two devices are a crate and a metal rack.
A crate is essentially a square wooden or molded plastic container adapted to contain one bottle. Crates are adapted to be stacked upon one another to allow transport and handling of a plurality of bottles. To stabilize a stack of crates, however, the stack must be wrapped with shrink-wrap plastic.
After transport of the stacked crates, in, for example, a delivery van, a worker must individually lift and unload each of the full crates to remove the bottles for delivery. This adds significant labor time and provides a higher risk for injury, especially wrist and back injuries, and injuries from falling crates. During transport, crates expose the bottle caps allowing caps to hit other crates which causes leaking.
Most crate systems transport the bottle in the crate into the clean, filler room. This contaminates the clean room, as simple crate washers cannot fully remove all contaminants. The additional weight of the crates causes additional wear and tear on transport equipment.
Metal racks are fixed in size and shape. After unloading the bottles from a delivery or transport truck using metal racks, the truck must return with the empty bottles held by the same metal rack that was used to deliver the bottles. The metal rack cannot be collapsed or rearranged to a more efficient shape. This means that the same number of vehicles must be used to transport racks full of empty bottles as racks of full bottles between the source and the distributor.
In addition, metal rusts and tends to rapidly corrode when exposed to the ozone used in many water purification processes, and the metal racks, which are fixed in size and shape, can cause damage to the interior walls and flooring of a transport or delivery vehicle.